Even by European standards, America has always been greed-driven and violent. Founded on drug-running (tobacco), genocide, slavery, and religious obsession, America has always pretended to be generating wealth, while in reality it has always been extracting wealth. Game animals of colonial times were hunted to extinction before the nation was even established, the great forests of North America have long since been cut down, farming continues to be based on the mining of topsoil, the mountains of Appalachia are still being ripped up and destroyed. Just stray examples.
As we began, so we end.
When the United States was formed, concepts of freedom and justice were introduced with great fanfare. But there has always been ambiguity: Are these real aspirations or just a convenient cover for plundering and scamming? The US has wandered from one pole to the other. Those who sought justice have never quite succeeded, but those devoted to the great lie have never quite achieved control. Until now: The skills of modern advertising have been wedded to the needs of propaganda, and in the hands of a cartelized state this may well taken us beyond hope of recovery. The American people were happy to sleep through two national selections, and now are sleeping through the final corruption of the Supreme Court. The republic comes to its sorry, pathetic conclusion. Welcome the cartelized state.
Not that the cartelized state will survive: It won’t. But not much else will survive either. The great die-off that humans have perpetrated on the biosphere is soon to be visited upon the human world. North America has been on the forefront of one, and will be on the forefront of the other.
Americans have never quite wanted to confront the requirements of justice, as this might have meant reducing profits, and an expanding economy freed them from having to do this. The requirements of prosperity–that everyone have the means to obtain what they need–were always rejected as socialistic. The consequence, though–that some would always be destitute by the workings of the system–had to be had to be circumvented, and this was done by postponement: If wealth seemed to be increasing then justice could always be allowed to lie in the future, when there would finally be “enough.” This ignored, of course, that the future never comes, and that for the greedy there is never enough. It also ignored the fact that from the beginning the wealth was the result not of creation, but of endless imperial expansion. The last great American success–the post-war period–was actually the result of taking over economically Britain’s colonial possessions. The era of easy taking is over, and the horizon is revealed: The cheap resources which made it all possible can be seen to be running out.
Eventually endless expansion comes to an end, and we return to the beginning. America was founded not just on the chattel slavery of Africans, but the indentured servitude of imported Europeans. As we return to our beginning, we institute chattel slavery abroad and in our gulag of prisons at home, while the (mis)management of the economy and the changing of lending laws prepare America to become a land of debt slavery. This is planned and deliberate: It is part of the cartelized state.
One of the great puzzles of the 20th century was whether the rich were truly resentful that Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved American capitalism for them. The answer is now revealed, in the 21st century: Yes.
The cartelized state can create a virtual environment–a pretend reality–that surrounds the public entirely: The orchestration of media events with Republican-Party talking-points and corporate merchandizing tie-ins can create a seamless simulation of reality for the inattentive. But this cannot prevent that state from sliding down the slope it creates for itself: The poor seek work, but there is no work, and gradually the entire structure of merchandizing collapses, as the rich, despite increasingly ostentatious display, are never a sufficient market to keep the economy functioning. The poor starve; the economy collapses. This is one reasons the cartelized state turns toward war–to replace the failing market–but this is only a temporary solution, for as resources become scarce, war only increases the scarcity.
When the cartelized state has collapsed, what will be left?
That which the state does not recognize as a resource.
That which the state has not had time to exploit–before failing.
That which has been hidden or withdrawn from its attention.
These are clues to what needs to be done.
